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7 Ways Microsoft Uses AI to Make You Actually Care About Bing

It isn’t just ChatGPT on the Bing website. Microsoft blends OpenAI’s language technology with its own Bing search engine.

Microsoft Bing faces a big problem: Google utterly eclipses search engine. But Bing has a chance to grab more attention for itself with the OpenAI‘s language technology, the artificial intelligence foundation that’s made the ChatGPT service a huge hit.

For the brainier Bing to work, though, Microsoft has to get the details right. ChatGPT can be useful, but it can be flaky, too, and nobody wants a search engine they can’t trust.

Microsoft has put a lot of thought and its own programming resources into the challenge. It’s wrestled with issues like how AI-powered Bing shows ads, reveals its data sources, and grounds the AI technology in reality so you get trustworthy results, not the digital hallucinations that can be hard to spot in machine-generated information.

I spoke to Jordi Ribas, leader of Bing search and AI, to dig more deeply into the overhauled Bing search engine. He’s a big enough fan that he used the technology to help him write his boss a memo about it. «It probably saved me two to three hours,» he said, and it improved the Spanish executive’s English, too.

When the technology expands beyond today’s very small test group, it’ll let millions of us dig for much more complicated information, like whether an Ikea loveseat will fit into your car. And we’ll all be able to see whether it truly gives Google a run for its money. But for now, are seven aspects of Bing AI that I learned.

Bing AI isn’t just a repackaged version of ChatGPT

Microsoft blends its Bing search engine with the large language model technology from OpenAI, the AI lab that built the ChatGPT tool that’s fired up excitement about AI and that Microsoft invested in. You can get ChatGPT-like results using Bing’s «chat» option — for example, «Write a short essay on the importance of Taoism.» But for other queries, Bing and OpenAI technology are blended through an orchestration system Microsoft calls Prometheus.

For instance, you can Bing, «I like the band Led Zeppelin. What other musicians should I listen to?» OpenAI first paraphrases that prompt to «bands similar to Led Zeppelin,» then repackages Bing search results in a bulleted list. Each suggestion, like Fleetwood Mac, Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones, comes with a two-sentence description.

Bing AI cites its sources — sometimes

When you give ChatGPT a prompt, it’ll respond with text it generates, but it won’t tell you where it got that information. The AI system is trained on vast amounts of the information on the internet, but it’s hard to draw a direct line between that training data and ChatGPT’s output.

On Bing, though, factual information is often annotated, because Bing knows the source from its indexing of the web. For example, in the Led Zeppelin prompt above, Bing includes a link at the top of its answer to a Musicaroo post, 13 Bands That Sound Like Led Zeppelin, and includes that link and others from MusicalMum and Producer Hive.

That sourcing transparency helps address a big criticism of AI, making it easier to evaluate whether the response is accurate or a mere AI hallucination. But it doesn’t always appear. In the essay on Taoism above, for example, there aren’t any sources, footnotes or links at all.

Some source links are ads that make Microsoft money

The Bing AI’s elaborate answers provide a new way for Microsoft to generate money from ads. In traditional Bing searches, the «organic» search results that Bing judges to be most relevant are separate from items placed by advertisers. But with Bing AI searches, the two types of information can be blended.

For example, in its response to the query «plan me a one-week trip to Iceland without a rental car,» AI-powered Bing suggests several destinations. In one of them, several words are underlined: «You can visit places like Vík, Skógafoss, Seljalandsfoss, and Jökulsárlón glacier lagoon by joining a multi-day tour or taking a bus.» Hovering over that link shows three sources for that information and an ad from a tour company. The advertisement is the top item of the three and is labeled «ad.»

«When you look at those citations, sometimes they are ads,» Ribas said. «When it’s more of a purchasing intent query, you hover over it and you’ll see the list of the references and sometimes it’s an ad. Then sometimes in the conversation itself, you’re going to see product ads, like if you do a hotel query.»

Ad revenue is a big deal, since it takes weeks of work on an enormous cluster of computers for OpenAI to build a single update to its language model, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman estimates it costs a few cents to process each ChatGPT prompt. Bing, even though it’s a distant second to Google in the search engine market, still handles millions of queries a day.

Google plans to open access to its Bard AI chatbot soon, but it won’t be including ads to begin with.

OpenAI-boosted results are more relevant than plain old Bing

The fundamental measure of a search engine’s usefulness is whether its results are relevant, and the OpenAI technology brings a huge boost in the measurement that Microsoft uses to score its search engine results’ relevance.

«My team, working super, super hard in a given year, might move that metric by one point,» Ribas said, but OpenAI’s technology boosted it three points in one fell swoop. «It’s just never happened before in the history of Bing,» Ribas said.

That relevance boost is just for ordinary search results, Ribas added. OpenAI’s technology can further improve Bing with its chat interface that offers more elaborate answers and a follow-up exchange.

OpenAI makes Bing better with languages besides English

One particular area where Bing has been weak is searches that aren’t in English, and Ribas said OpenAI helps there. A lot of Bing’s three-point gain in relevance scoring «came from international markets,» Ribas said.

OpenAI’s large language model, or LLM, is trained with text from 100 languages. «Catalan is my first language. I can have a dialogue in Catalan. It works really, really well,» Ribas said

Bing brings OpenAI’s results up to date

Large language models like OpenAI’s GPT-3.5, the foundation for ChatGPT, are slow to build and improve, which means they don’t move at the speed of the web or of conventional search engines. GPT-3.5, for example, was trained in 2021, so it doesn’t have any idea about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the effects of recent inflation on consumers, or Xi Jinping securing his third term as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party.

Bing often does know this more recent information, though. «When you bring in the Bing results, then you will get fresh results on that complete answer,» Ribas said.

Bing ‘grounds’ OpenAI’s flights of fancy

Microsoft uses its Bing data to try to avoid situations where OpenAI’s more creative technology could lead people astray. The more factual a query and answer are, the more Bing’s technology is used in the answer, Ribas said. This «grounding» significantly reduces AI’s problems with making stuff up: «It will reduce hallucination, which is … an ongoing battle,» Ribas said.

But Microsoft doesn’t want its grounding system to squash all the magic out of the AI. There’s a reason ChatGPT has been so captivating. The Prometheus system decides on the priorities for each query.

«We had to find the sweet spot between over-grounding the model and keeping it interesting,» Ribas said. «We have a measurement of the interestingness of the results, and we have a measurement for the groundedness of the results. The more the query is looking for something very factual, the more we weight the grounded. The more the query is supposed to be creative, the less we weight the grounded. I kept telling my team, I want my cake and eat it too.»

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Apple, I’m (Sky) Blue About Your iPhone 17 Air Color

Commentary: The rumored new hue of the iPhone 17 Air is more sky blah than sky blue.

I can’t help but feel blue about the latest rumor that Apple’s forthcoming iPhone 17 Air will take flight in a subtle, light-hued color called sky blue.

Sky blue isn’t a new color for Apple. It’s the featured shade of the current M4 MacBook Air, a shimmer of cerulean so subtle as to almost be missed. It’s silver left too close to an aquarium; silver that secretly likes to think it’s blue but doesn’t want everyone else to notice.

Do Apple employees get to go outside and see a real blue sky? It’s actually vivid, you can check for yourself. Perhaps the muted sky blue color reflects a Bay Area late winter/early spring frequent layer of clouds like we typically see here in Seattle.

«Who cares?» you might find yourself saying. «Everyone gets a case anyway.» I hear you and everyone else who’s told me that. But design-focused Apple is as obsessive about colors as they are about making their devices thinner. And I wonder if their heads are in the clouds about which hues adorn their pro products.

Making the case for a caseless color iPhone

I’m more invested in this conversation than most — I’m one of those freaks who doesn’t wrap my phone in a case. I find cases bulky and superfluous, and I like to be able to see Apple’s design work. Also, true story, I’ve broken my iPhone screen only twice: First when it was in a «bumper» that Apple sent free in response to the iPhone 4 you’re-holding-it-wrong Antennagate fiasco, and second when trying to take long exposure starry night photos using what I didn’t realize was a broken tripod mount. My one-week-old iPhone 13 Pro slipped sideways and landed screen-first on a pointy rock. A case wouldn’t have saved it.

My current model is an iPhone 16 Pro in black titanium — which I know seems like avoiding color entirely — but previously I’ve gone for colors like blue titanium and deep purple. I wanted to like deep purple the most but it came across as, in the words of Patrick Holland in his iPhone 14 Pro review, «a drab shade of gray or like Grimace purple,» depending on the light.

Pros can be bold, too

Maybe the issue is too many soft blues. Since the iPhone Pro age began with the iPhone 11 Pro, we’ve seen variations like blue titanium (iPhone 15 Pro), sierra blue (iPhone 13 Pro) and pacific blue (iPhone 12 Pro).

Pacific blue is the boldest of the bunch, if by bold you mean dark enough to discern from silver, but it’s also close enough to that year’s graphite color that seeing blue depends on the surrounding lighting. By comparison, the blue (just «blue») color of the iPhone 12 was unmistakably bright blue.

In fact, the non-Pro lines have embraced vibrant colors. It’s as if Apple is equating «pro» with «sophisticated,» as in «A real pro would never brandish something this garish.» I see this in the camera world all the time: If it’s not all-black, it’s not a «serious» camera.

And yet I know lots of pros who are not sophisticated — proudly so. People choose colors to express themselves, so forcing that idea of professionalism through color feels needlessly restrictive. A bright pink iPhone 16 might make you smile every time you pick it up but then frown because it doesn’t have a telephoto camera.

Color is also important because it can sway a purchase decision. «I would buy a sky blue iPhone yesterday,» my colleague Gael Cooper texted after the first rumor popped online. When each new generation of iPhones arrive, less technically different than the one before, a color you fall in love with can push you into trading in your perfectly-capable model for a new one.

And lest you think Apple should just stick with black and white for its professional phones: Do you mean black, jet black, space black, midnight black, black titanium, graphite or space gray? At least the lighter end of the spectrum has stuck to just white, white titanium and silver over the years.

Apple never got ahead by being beige

I’m sure Apple has reams of studies and customer feedback that support which colors make it to production each year. Like I said, Apple’s designers are obsessive (in a good way). And I must remind myself that a sky blue iPhone 17 Air is a rumored color on a rumored product so all the usual caveats apply.

But we’re talking about Apple here. The scrappy startup that spent more than any other company on business cards at the time because each one included the old six-color Apple logo. The company that not only shaped the first iMac like a tipped-over gumdrop, that not only made the case partially see-through but then made that cover brilliant Bondi blue.

Embrace the iPhone colors, Apple.

If that makes you nervous, don’t worry: Most people will put a case on it anyway.

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Astronomers Say There’s an Increased Possibility of Life on This Distant Planet

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers are working to confirm potential evidence of life on a distant exoplanet dubbed K2-18b.

Astronomers are nearing a statistically significant finding that could confirm the potential signs of life detected on the distant exoplanet K2-18b are no accident.

The team of astronomers, led by the University of Cambridge, used data from the James Webb Space Telescope (which has only been in use since the end of 2021) to detect chemical traces of dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and/or dimethyl disulfide (DMDS), which they say can only be produced by life such as phytoplankton in the sea. 

According to the university, «the results are the strongest evidence yet that life may exist on a planet outside our solar system.»

The findings were published this week in the Astrophysical Journal Letters and point to the possibility of an ocean on this planet’s surface, which scientists have been hoping to discover for years. In the abstract for the paper, the team says, «The possibility of hycean worlds, with planet-wide oceans and H2-rich atmospheres, significantly expands and accelerates the search for habitable environments elsewhere.»

Not everyone agrees, however, that what the team found proves there’s life on the exoplanet.

Science writer and OpenMind Magazine founder Corey S. Powell posted about the findings on Bluesky, writing, «The potential discovery of alien life is so enticing that it drags even reputable outlets into running naive or outright misleading stories.» He added, «Here we go again with planet K2-18b.Um….there’s strong evidence of non-biological sources of the molecule DMS.»

K2-18b is 124 light-years away and much larger than Earth (more than eight times our mass), but smaller than Neptune. The search for signs of even basic life on a planet like this increases the chances that there are more planets like Earth that may be inhabitable, with temperatures and atmospheres that could sustain human-like lifeforms. The team behind the paper hopes that more study with the James Webb Space Telescope will help confirm their initial findings.

More research to do on finding life on K2-18b

The exoplanet K2-18b is not the only place where scientists are exploring the possibility of life, and this research is still an early step in the process, said Christopher Glein, a geochemist, planetary researcher and lead scientist at San Antonio’s Southwest Research Institute. Excitement over the significance of the research, he said, should be tempered.

«We need to be careful here,» Glein said. «It appears that there is something in the data that can’t be explained, and DMS/DMDS can provide an explanation. But this detection is stretching the limits of JWST’s capabilities.»

Glein added, «Further work is needed to test whether these molecules are actually present. We also need complementary research assessing the abiotic background on K2-18b and similar planets. That is, the chemistry that can occur in the absence of life in this potentially exotic environment. We might be seeing evidence of some cool chemistry rather than life.»

The TRAPPIST-1 planets, he said, are being researched as potentially habitable, as is LHS 1140b, which he said «is another astrobiologically significant exoplanet, which might be a massive ocean world.»

As for K2-18b, Glein said many more tests need to be performed before there’s consensus on life existing on it.

«Finding evidence of life is like prosecuting a case in the courtroom,» Glein said. «Multiple independent lines of evidence are needed to convince the jury, in this case the worldwide scientific community.» He added, «If this finding holds up, then that’s Step 1.»

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